Chin up, Paula Poundstone arrives to amuse Cape Cod

Paula Poundstone has been able to be there for her children, as she is able to be there for her audiences.

Lee Roscoe

COMIC RELIEF – Paula Poundstone serves up comic nuggets in There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say. You can see her in person in Provincetown Aug. 26.

Believes in humor as force for healing

Paula Poundstone has been able to be there for her children, as she is able to be there for her audiences. Through 90 shows at least a year, plus her appearances on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, the improvisational topical quiz show, with a few hilarious red herrings thrown in, she has built a devoted following while gaining new audiences at every turn. “I work like a dog and love it,” she said in a recent telephone interview prior to her Aug. 26 appearance at Provincetown’s Crown & Anchor.

A social life? Forget it. “I’m happy for all of you who have one,” said Poundstone.

She has a huge gay following, which is a “treasure,” but said of her own sexuality: “I don’t know what I am or if I ‘ll ever figure it out. At the moment I am nothing.” She is so busy when she does have free time or comes home after a show, she goes right to sleep. “The idea of having someone in there with whom I have to engage in an any kind of …activity…..would be …upsetting.”

Talking about where the funny comes from, she recollects Garrison Keillor during a rehearsal for a taping of his “Joke Show” for A Prairie Home Companion. “He sat on a stool telling jokes. He told us even the Jews in concentration camps told jokes to keep themselves going.” She paused. “We know humor can be a force for healing physically and emotionally.”

Part Cherokee (at least according to her mom's allegations), she says she doesn’t know if being part of an oppressed people contributes to her own hip world-view. “I don’t know enough about my DNA to be sure,” she said. “But I do know when I get a belly laugh for myself or the audience, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.” She has had that feeling since she was just out of babyhood. She keeps a framed note from her kindergarten teacher in Sudbury, Massachusetts: “We have enjoyed Paula’s humorous comments on our activities.”

Her act, said Poundstone, “is autobiographical. I talk a little bit about getting there, about my kids, my animals, while still paying enough attention to the news to try to cast a decent vote.” She asks the audience questions and riffs on that – commenting that it is amazing what you can learn in a few minutes.

She keeps her comedy fresh by anticipation. “I try to load myself with what I’m looking forward to telling people,” she said. “When you haven’t seen a friend for a long time – all that stuff you’ve wanted to share with the person. I have that feeling without generating it artificially; the audience is my best friend.”

I can hear her thinking. Then she confesses: “I used to hate talking to people individually after the show. Focusing on one person rather than the whole group. They’d come up to me and say they loved the show and I’d say, thank you, and their faces would fall. Now I love talking to people after the show. Now I feel I know these people, kind of like the Rotary or Friars Club; these are my people.”

She also socializes via Twitter. She’ll write a joke while in the shower and put it out there, but “I’ve never tweeted in the shower at least.”

Poundstone partners with older-fashioned media too, libraries and librarians, to raise money and awareness. “It’s funny that we think of libraries as quiet, demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women,” she said in a statement on the American Library Association website. “The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.”

Poundstone won’t do mean humor; she says she hated it when first doing stand up and gays, for instance, would be an easy target for a cheap-shot joke for the act between the emcee and the headliner. Regarding people’s rights and dignity, she says we have come a long way, but we need to go further. While climate change and the bathos of our political discourse these days discourages her, “I want people to leave my concerts feeling uplifted.”

While her 33 years of great wit have landed her in the Comedy Hall of Fame, we get to see her live. And she will be there in her less shy version after the show to talk to folks and to sign her new book and CD, after her performance at the Paramount at the Crown & Anchor in Provincetown Aug. 26. Showtimes are 7:30 and 9 p.m. For tickets ($40/$55), call 508-487-1430 or go to www.onlyatthecrown.com